I hate to double post but i think i MIGHT have figured it out.... I put the card in a windows system did a full fat32 format.... no quick format... Put it back into the nix system that reports it as a windows 95 fat system but with the bootable flag set. I used cfdisk to change it to a linux filesystem. then i took it put it back
into the windows system. Funny thing is windows loads it just fine and reports it as fat32. I rebooted the nix box... its a live cd then loaded the sd card back up and cfdisk reports it as a nix partition. Strange right? I dont know what it is now but im gonna try it and hope its nix and fixes my issue. any one care to share some light on why this is the case it would be appreciated.